Your best friends have taken their first vacation in years and from the moment they left for the airport, they’ve been tweeting a mile-a-minute. You really don’t want to block or unfollow either of them, but with the flood of tweets, you are so tempted, you really are. The good news: Twitter has found a cure for that.

Twitter is just rolling out a new mute feature for its users. Muting doesn’t deep six them or sic the Tweet Police on them, it basically keeps their tweets from showing up on your timeline. It also stops you from getting SMS or push notifications from them.

Your friends are not alerted so no feelings will be hurt. In fact they won’t even know that you’ve muted, or for lack of a better term, silenced them. Also good to avoid embarrassment!

You just wonder if it was a really good idea. In just over two minutes you get to see over 30 animals and exotic insects take over the offices when all hell breaks loose over at Toronto-based, Klick Health in a twisted take on “Bring Your Pet to Work Day.”

Indigo is making it quicker and easier for their customers to find stores, shop in-store or on-line or on the go, earn rewards, be social and save money by releasing the new Indigo Mobile App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

When Kelly Falardeau, author of 1,000 Tips for Teens, received this text message during a presentation she was giving to a group of 150 tech-savvy Grade 7 teens, she was unsure how to respond. She had also received four more just like it.

“Women” she says, “who I speak to mostly, don’t ask me about suicide, they ask me about how to feel great and how to look better.”

But her thoughts quickly turned to one of her daughters, who had turned 13 two weeks before, when she realized that she, too, could be thinking about suicide.

She finally shared a story with the audience from her own teen years and thoughts of suicide.

When she was two, she tells them, she was in an accident that left burns over 75 per cent of her body. And when she was in Grade 11, she used to pray before she went to sleep: “Dear God, please don’t make me wake up in the morning, but if I have to, could you at least make me ‘scar-less’ and pretty like all the other girls? Thank you, Amen.”

She wants teens to know that, even though suicide is at an all-time high, life is worth living.

“Do you understand that suicide is final?” she now tells teens. “If you actually succeed, no more ‘Facebooking’ or texting your best friends, no more Justin Bieber or One Direction concerts; no more sleepovers. There’s no more of any of that.”

We have to tell them, she says, that “we haven’t given up on them. We want to show them we care.”

While contemplating her own suicide as a teen, Falardeau says, she also hadn’t thought about the pain and suffering she would have caused her family, her friends and the people who loved her. Falardeau admits that these thoughts still occur to her as an adult, but that thinking about her little nine-year old son keeps her alive.

“I would never want my son to go through that pain of never seeing his mom again.”

It isn’t uncommon for Falardeau to receive text messages during her presentations. In fact, she received 100 during that same presentation. “I allow them to text me their questions,” she says, because it helps ensure she tells her teen audience what they want to know, and not just what she thinks they ought to know.

To get her message out beyond her physical audiences, Falardeau and co-author Martin Presse decided to write 1,000 Tips for Teens. But they wanted the book to be about more than just suicide. They wanted it to become a resource that would guide teens through the challenges they were encountering in their lives.

The two approached friends and family members to contribute 100 tips for teens. The interest was so overwhelming however, Falardeau says, that 100 became 1,000.

Falardeau, an international motivational speaker and best-selling author of two books No Risk No Rewards and Self Esteem Doesn’t Come in a Bottle, was recently recognized for her efforts with a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, presented by Donald S. Ethell, Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, and the Rona Ambrose, the federal Minister of Public Works and Government Services and member of Parliament for Edmonton-Spruce Grove. The Medal is bestowed upon an individual, “who like Her Majesty, have dedicated themselves to service, to family, community and country,” said Ambrose.

1,000 Tips for Teens is being launched today on Amazon.com to coincide with National Child Day, celebrated in Canada and many other countries as Universal Children’s Day, to honour children around the world.

Greg Gazin, a Tech Columnist, Small Business and Technology Speaker and Senior Editor at Troy Media contributed to 1,000 Tips for Teens. He can be reached at Gadgetguy.CA on Twitter @gadgetgreg or you can find him on Empire Avenue at (e)GADGET1.

This article is FREE to use on your websites or in your publications. However, Troy Media, with a link to its web site, MUST be credited.

EDMONTON, AB, Nov. 16, 2012/ Troy Media/ – A UK husband-and-wife team, Dom and Domino, known as DES Daughter, is on a crusade to raise awareness of Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a prescribed drug that, while off the market for decades, has had and may still have devastating side effects on third-generation children. Yet it is virtually unknown.

DES was the first synthetic man-made female sex hormone (oestrogen) prescribed for public use, used mainly between 1938 and1971, but in spite of issues discovered as early as 1971 it was still prescribed in some countries through the 1990’s. It was used primarily and marketed aggressively to prevent miscarriage and complications during pregnancy as well as for more than 100 additional medical conditions. In the U.S. alone, it’s estimated that five to 10 million people may have been exposed to the drug. READ MORE AT TROY MEDIA

If you haven’t changed your LinkedIn password recently, now you might just have to. Reports had surfaced earlier that a file containing 6.5 million encrypted passwords have been leaked and posted on a Russian hacker site, might be from LinkedIn accounts and many of those have already been cracked. As it turns out, they were.

“One Billion Dollars,” is the kind of thing you’d hear from the lips of Dr. Evil from an Austin Powers movie. But today for the folks over at Instagram, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sounds more like the Easter Bunny than an evil-doer on this holiday Monday, as he announced that Facebook will be buying Instagram for the tune of approximately that same amount – $1 billion. And that’s a lot of eggs.